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Below is the transcript of an interview with our friend Jonathan Chashper of Product Savvy about his experience in rapidly building an app, Wolfpack, using various AWS tools. From getting his team in a room and unpacking laptops, to releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) for beta testing took 14 weeks, which Jonathan attributes not only to the skill of his team but to the ease-of-use and agility they gained from AWS.

Thanks for speaking with us, Jonathan! First of all, can you tell us a little bit about Wolfpack? What is it, and why did you decide to start it?

I am a motorcycle rider. A few years ago, I went on a group ride, and very quickly, the group broke apart. Some people missed a turn, some people got stuck at a red light, and a group of six suddenly became three groups of two. It took us about half an hour to figure out where everyone was, since you need to pull over, call everyone, and then – since everyone is riding their motorcycles – wait for them to pull over and call you back. It’s one big mess.

So I thought, there has to be a technical solution to this. I decided we should build a system that would allow me to track everyone I’m riding with, so I could see where the people riding with me are at any given time. If I got disconnected from the group, I could see where they are and pull over to gather back together. This was Eureka #1

Eureka #2 was understanding that communication is the second big problem for moving in groups. When you ride in a group, on motorcycles, you’re usually riding in a column. Let’s say you’re rider #4 and you need gas. You cannot just pull over into a gas station, because you will get separated from the group. So usually what happens is that you speed up, you try to signal to the guy at the head of the column, and you point to the gas tank, you hope he understands and actually pulls into a gas station. It’s dangerous. So this is the second problem that people have when they move in packs, and these are the two problems that Wolfpack is solving: Keeping the group together and allowing for communication during the ride.

Wolfpack is a system for moving in groups. It doesn’t have to be motorcycles, but that’s the first niche we’re releasing it for. It’s also relevant for a group of cars, or even walking on foot with ten people around you, people get separated, and so on.

So we built a system that allows you as a user to install an app on a mobile device (both iOS and Android), that will allow you to manage the groups you want to travel with. Then, once you have the groups defined, you can define a trip with a starting point and an ending point. Everyone in the group then gets a map, and everyone can hop on it and start traveling together.

Here’s WolfPack’s About video, if you’re interested:

What AWS tools did you leverage when building Wolfpack?

Wolfpack is built on AWS, and we’re using CloudFront, we’re using SNS, we’re using S3 buckets, we’re using RDS, and of course EC2 instances, load balancing, Auto Scaling Groups, all the pretty buzzwords. We use them all – even AWS IoT, actually.

Have you had any interaction with AWS?

No, we’ve done it 100% ourselves. We’ve never talked to any solutions architects or anyone at AWS. It’s that easy to use.

What Amazon is doing is unbelievable. Things that used to take months or years to accomplish, you can now accomplish in days by clicking a couple of buttons and writing a little bit of code.

Why did you choose to develop on AWS?

The ecosystem they’ve created. This is why I think AWS is awesome: they’ve identified the pain points for people who want to build software.

The basic problem they identified is the need to buy servers. That’s the very basic solution they’ve given you: you can stand up a server in two minutes, you don’t need to buy or pay ten thousand dollars out of pocket, and so on and so forth, these are the good old EC2 Instances.

Then they went step by step and they said, okay, the next problem is managing databases. Before RDS, I had to have my own database from Oracle, and you’d have to buy a solution for load balancing, a solution for failover, back-up, recovery, etc., and this would cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. AWS took that pain away by providing RDS.

The next step was message queues. Again, in the past, we would go to IBM, we would go to Oracle, back in the day, and you would use their message queues. It was complex, one message queue didn’t work with the other, and it was a mess. So AWS created the SNS to solve that.

And so on and so forth, like a domino. They have the buckets to solve the storage issue. Now the newest thing is IoT, where they understand that there’s billions of devices out there trying to send messages to each other, and very quickly, you clog the system. So AWS said, “okay, we’ll solve that problem now.” And they created the AWS IoT system which allows you to connect any device you want, very quickly, and support, I don’t know, probably billions and billions of messages. Almost for free, it doesn’t really cost anything. It’s a great system.

Have you had any challenges with AWS so far?

No, actually, no technological challenges so far. What they offer is really easy to use and understand. The one thing we do want to do is pay as little as we can for the EC2 servers, which is where we’re using ParkMyCloud to schedule on/off times for our non-production servers.

Are you using any other tools for automation and DevOps?

Yes, we are using Jenkins – we have a continuous integration machine. Our testing is still manual, unfortunately.

Continuous integration is the idea that every time someone completes a piece of code, they submit that to a repository. Jenkins has a script that takes that out of the repository, compiles everything, and deploys it. So at any given time, every time someone submits something, it’s immediately ready for my QA guy to test. The need for “Integration Sessions” went down, drastically. .

How long has the development taken?

From the minute we put the team together, until we had an MVP, we had seven sprints, which is just 14 weeks. And when I say “putting the team together,” I mean they went into a room and unpacked their laptops on March 1st. Now, fourteen weeks later, we had our MVP, which we’re now using for beta testing.

And did your team have deep AWS experience, or were some of them beginners?

Some of them had a little bit of AWS experience, but most of it came from us as on-the-job training. If you’re a software engineer, it’s really easy to get it.

On your non-production servers, where you’re using ParkMyCloud, do you know what percent of savings you’re getting?

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About Katy Stalcup

Katy Stalcup is the Marketing Manager for ParkMyCloud, where she’s responsible for a wide variety of content development, campaigns, and events. Since ParkMyCloud's founding, she's evangelized its message of simple cost savings and automation (seriously, in the words of one of our customers, "There is literally no reason not to use ParkMyCloud"). Katy is a Northern Virginia native who is happy to contribute to the region’s growing reputation as an East Coast gathering point for technology innovation - particularly as a graduate of the Alexandria, VA Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. She also earned bachelor’s degrees in communication and psychology from Virginia Tech. In her free time, she enjoys reading novels, playing strategy board games, and travel both near and far.
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